The triumphant reawakening of San Francisco’s masters of behemoth ritualistic darkness…

Within “Shrines For The Unwanted, Respite For The Cast Aside”, bone, antler and voice produce connective threads between the worlds, as guitar and percussion punctuate shifts in mood. Voices call to the spirits, and the spirits call back in return. Recorded in 2016 during four private, collective only rituals, the pieces pull the listener through the darkest and most overgrown trails of the blackest forest. Monumental and horizonless ritualistic black ambience. Vocal visitations by A.C. Way of Sutekh Hexen.

In a country where youth culture has been heavily restricted for so long, it’s significant when a cultural form such as this has an opportunity to reach a wider audience – aided by the abstract nature of dark ambient, drone and noise. In comparison, the dance music scene has a harder time taking root in Iran due to the illegality of men and women dancing in public together. However, the growth of the experimental electronic scene is going to be about more than a mere novelty reaction to a political paradigm shift. The darkness here is a consequence of the mood of the artists – darker after the country was put on a black list and more restrictions were applied to many things, including monetary transactions to and from Iran. As a consequence, Iranian artists have a great difficulty getting the resources to better develop their projects. Despite this, the enthusiasm and will for Iranian musicians to promote their music shines through.

Trepaneringsritualen explores themes of religion, magick and the hidden realms of consciousness, taking its musical cues from the old school of ritual ambient & death industrial. Rhythmic and seething at times, and oozing forward with a creeping sense of desolation at others, Trepaneringsritualen conjures forth bleak but mesmerizing visions of the end-times.

“Perfection & Permanence”: a hymn to Isis; a further exploration of the duality of the holy harlot, the black skinned Magdalen, mother and concert of the Christ; Yeshua Ben Yosef, son of MAN; the shameful dead, those who sold their brothers, condemned to forever roam the earth; to transgress the abyss, to mortify flesh, towards cosmic renovation. It is lonely, it is awful; on the verge of physical death, but still unable to understand; absolute perfection may be attained through WILL. A conversation with angels, in archaic tongues; Eiríkr inn Sigrsæli sold his blood and kin to desert rats for corporeal power. Eirikr, we spit on you.; from across the abyss, it rises. Ceaseless, blood-churning, terrible; an incoherent accusation by the mirror image, he who’s blood was shed to atone another man’s sins. Without bloodshed there can be no salvation.

Ltd x 500 copies on blood red vinyl.

“…a perversely satisfying experience. With Perfection & Permanence, Ekelund has created that most chimeric of beasts: an accessible, even what some might say commercial, noise album. The shadowy world of power electronics and by extension death industrial can be tough for a novice to navigate, but Trepaneringsritualen makes for an excellent starting point.” (Pitchfork)”

Kernschmelze: ‘the dying gasps of the Age of Enlightenment’. ‘Kernschmelze II’ is a cantata for voices, in this case the voice of CRASSsongstress EVE LIBERTINE, processed by CHARLES WEBBER to almost choral proportions. Working on Kernschmelze II alongside Eve Libertine, PENNY RIMBAUD has been able to produce a classic album on a par with their ‘Acts of Love’ of 1984 (Crass Records). Libertine’s sparse, vulnerable poetics counter the almost Wagnerian scale of the work, challenging preconceptions of what music should be and making strong suggestions as to what it might yet become. Extreme electronics sourced solely from vocal sounds to create noise music of an intense and highly demanding nature. Ecopak with artwork by GEE VAUCHER.

Unnerving, intense, bloodcurdling, sinister, dramatic – the music of “Kosmogonia” features Penderecki’s famous, unorthodox instrumental techniques, and some of the darkest music ever composed.

Hailed by The Guardian as “Poland’s greatest living composer”, Krzysztof Penderecki is the maestro behind the unforgettable, disturbing music on The Shining (including ‘De Natura Sonoris No. 2’, featured here). A complex tapestry of sound with striking use of pizzicato and flexatone, with aggressive barrages from brass and percussion, dissonant woodwind chords, spoken and hissing sounds, fervent strings, swirling organ, climactic choral and solo vocals.

Krzysztof Penderecki’s unique music has featured in films such as: The Shining, The Exorcist, Children Of Men, The People Under The Stairs, Shutter Island, Inland Empire, Fearless, Wild At Heart, and recently featured on the Twin Peaks reboot.

Thanks to the estate of Krzysztof Penderecki, Cold Spring are honoured to present this masterpiece in digital format for the first time since the 1974 vinyl release. Sympathetically remastered for CD by Denis Blackham and Martin Bowes. 6-panel digipak.

Officially licensed from Irwin Chusid of the SUN RA estate, Cold Spring’s Justin Mitchell negotiated rare and unreleased tracks from the SUN RA archive to be remixed and treated by Masami Akita. The tracks incorporate the jazz power of SUN RA, carried into brutal excess by the legendary Japanese artist, MERZBOW.This release is available in two distinct editions: 180gm green vinyl with download code (Ltd x 300) – and a matt laminated digipak CD. Please note that both formats have completely different music!

“Governance” continues KHOST’s immersion in themes of detachment and dissonance, and ruminates upon the exertion of wills that are not your own, and upon the ways to detect and trace the outlines of the presence(s) that may exert these daily wills upon you, day by day. It was written over the course of the 2016/17 Winter, during times of unease and sickness for the band, including one near-death experience. The resulting album is a hinterland of low resolution transmissions interspersed with broad concrete columns of distortion that loom suddenly from the dim landscape. Governance is like driving at night with your spirituality asleep at the wheel.

“Mine” is the second release for the Italian artist Alice Kundalini with her solo project She Spread Sorrow. Between the dark rooms of an abandoned college, where whispers and obscene thoughts mingle, where little bells and distortions come together, the inner voices are fleeing to the rules of harmony to awaken a darker sound, hidden and deprived, of those who have something to hide. Ritual deathscapes, obscure Death Industrial, sinful Power Electronics. Ltd x 300 copies with digital download code.

Following the unrestrained act of aggression that was 2014’s “Altamont Rising”, Swedish Death Industrial act SHIFT returns to more personal and ethereal domains on “Abandon”. Created over a ten year period from a huge cache of sources, boiled down to four tracks of unyielding slow moving heaviness. Abandon features several guest appearances and is SHIFT’s most complex recording to date. Spot-varnished digipak.

Created from the solitude of the high and lonely places, Death Has No Companion uses the TenHornedBeast aesthetic to explore the isolation of the inner and outer worlds. Discordant piano chords build to shimmering blizzards of feedback. Drones and tones fall like snow and settle in the frozen landscapes. Strings flutter in the bitter winds. Does the spirit not falter when the Wanderer sees the night fall before him? Lamentation and sorrow. Winter eternal and everlasting. We all must walk the Long Road alone. Death has no companion. 6-panel digipak.

RECENT RELEASES:

SKULLFLOWER‘The Spirals Of Great Harm’
2CD
(CSR230CD)

NYTT LAND ‘Fimbulvinter’
CD
(CSR234CD)

LA BREICHE‘Le Mal Des Ardents’
CD
(CSR224CD)

ZOS KIA / COIL ‘Transparent’
CD
(CSR230CD)

A sprawling double disc from black noise classicists Skullflower – referencing Inferno 17, Dante and Virgil’s spiralling descent into the abyss on demon Geryon. Full of harsh beauty and hymns for lost Albions, battle songs against the homogenisation of modern ‘lyfe’. Hints and echoes of native keening, lush prog romanticism, and the charcoal textures of noise, but all subsumed within our alchemy, the unmistakable wellspring of sound that is SF. 6-panel double digipak.

Largely compared with the legendary Wardruna, Nytt Land are unique in their devotion to ritual Northern music and tradition. Their approach, using genuine native hand-crafted instruments, and true Old Norse, help them to grasp the true spirit of ancient Northern music like no one in Eastern Europe has done before. Their music is mostly based on the sources from Poetic Edda, performed in original Old Islandic. 6-panel digipak featuring all lyrics.

La Breiche (“the witch”) features Arexis and Lafforgue of Stille Volk and Sus Scrofa. A concept album about fears, terrors, about the balance between folklore and reason, myth and common sense, light and darkness. Minimalism, purity, a fine approach and ancient instruments: traditional music; the gloom of oppressive dark ambient; the slow pace of ritual music, wavering between modernity and archaism. 6-panel digipak.

John Gosling (MEKON), John Balance (COIL) and Min, with guest Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson (THROBBING GRISTLE). The entire recordings released for the first time. Completely remastered from the unedited tapes. Includes 2 bonus tracks by AKE (pre-ZOS KIA). Genuinely unsettling and disturbing, with a more primal Industrial feel than the Coil album which followed; ‘Scatology’. 6-panel digipak.

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